Disclaimer: No Place Like Home review code was provided by Chicken Launcher/Awaken Realms. All opinions expressed in this review in progress are solely those of the author.
A post-apocalyptic story featuring lost family, reclaiming your home, and battling robots that hurl toxic waste at you might not sound like a very fun time, but No Place Like Home is just that.
The story of No Place Like Home focuses on Ellen, a young woman looking for her grandfather after arriving at his empty farm. What starts out as a simple “find this person” is slowly becoming a much larger story which is going to be interesting to explore. With most of humanity having left Earth for a station in orbit of Mars, there’s only a handful of people left behind to help Ellen in her search for answers. As she is doing this, there is also the small matter of cleaning up all the trash and rubble left behind.
Home is where the heart is…along with a few other things
With the family farm serving as a home base, exploring the map is done in stages with players needing to upgrade their gear to progress past certain barriers to progress with the story. Each area of the map also acts as a chapter in the story, which allows for proper exploration and really immersing Ellen into this world she had left behind. Some of the tasks in each chapter are a bit repetitive – collect this resource, bring it to this person or take it to this location – but it never feels like a slog to complete them.
When it comes to the core gameplay, No Place Like Home is an easy game to get started with. The tutorial takes you through most of the basics – using your vacuum/drill pack, interacting with animals, planting crops, building etc – but there are still a few things that you need to figure out on your own. For example, it took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out how to plant a single tree. On the plus side, the tutorial doesn’t get caught up in needing characters to explain in bits what you need to do as you play the tutorial on the path to the farm to open the game.
Also, there is no one way to play this game. Once you complete the opening mission – which sets up the world, a few of the characters and the story arc – you can really play how you want to. There is a nice balance between going out and exploring every part of the map or just spending time at the farm gathering resources and looking after your animals and crops. The approach I took playing so far was exploring as much of one part of the map as I could then spending about the same amount of time working on setting up and organising the farm.
At this point, I’m around 20 hours into the game and it feels like I’ve made more progress with clearing the map and rebuilding my farm than with the actual story. The characters I’ve met have been nice to talk to and haven’t really felt like just dealing with the stock NPCs you might encounter in other games like this one. One aspect of the characters I have enjoyed is that everyone I’ve encountered so far has a connection to either Ellen or her grandfather. It might not turn out to be much in terms of the overall story, but it was a nice little inclusion.
Watch your step and mind the robots
Since exploration and resource gathering is key to this game, conflict and combat do take a little bit of a backseat. While it is there – in the form of robots which attack pretty much on sight with toxic waste as the main weapon – the fights are usually short and not too difficult to get past as long as I didn’t try and take on too many at once. It really is a numbers game and you do need to be smart about which direction you travel in, and the resources you carry. Even if you do lose and get knocked out, you just get transported back to the homestead base with no real loss to progress.
However, if you focus too much on gathering, the inventory fills up fast. This leaves no room for the consumable food items that need to be to hand for a healing boost. Items can be grouped together in bundles but those are limited to certain sizes. For example, seeds can be stored in bunches of 40 but the plots to plant them in are limited to 10. So, you need to keep an eye on it as it will only tell you when the inventory is full with little to no warning.
One major issue with No Place Like Home comes from the performance. Even using standard settings for the visuals, my PC did run hot while playing this game. So, it is worth going through those to find the best way to try and avoid this if you can as it will have an impact on how long you can enjoy this game without having to worry about overheating. This is a shame, as No Place Like Home has a lot going for it visually, especially once you really start cleaning up all the rubbish from the map.
Another downside, on a personal level, is the lack of timers. Whether it be growing plants, converting trash into building materials or building/upgrading something, there is no indication as to how long it will take to complete. The only clock is a world clock in the corner of the screen, which also gives you an autosave at the start of each in-game day. Not having any other timer is a bit annoying for me personally as I like knowing how much time I must fill before a task is completed.
The only way I found of getting around this was going to sleep – which also acts as an autosave – back at the farm. This would move time forward to the next day and I just had to hope the plant I needed was ready to harvest or my building upgrade had finished, which wasn’t always the case. It did get a little frustrating having to wait for an unknown period, but it really is a small complaint in an otherwise charming game.
If you want a fun farming game with a post-apocalyptic twist, charming characters, and beautiful scenery (underneath all the trash), then No Place Like Home would be a great addition to any library if you have a few hours to spare.
Score – 7.5/10
No Place Like Home will be available on PC via Steam from March 17.
Words by Megan Roxburgh
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